Businessweek Talks About Click Frauds in Online Advertising

Businessweek has featured their top story this time about Click Fraud, the dark side of online advertising.

“A BusinessWeek investigation has revealed a thriving click-fraud underground populated by swarms of small-time players, making detection difficult. “Paid to read” rings with hundreds or thousands of members each, all of them pressing PC mice over and over in living rooms and dens around the world. In some cases, “clickbot” software generates page hits automatically and anonymously.”

Top web advertising programs like Google Adsense / Adwords and Yahoo Publisher Network allow you and me to place targeted pay per click contextual ads on our sites. Whenever a visitor clicks the ads, they charge the advertiser per click and the publishers also get a commission out of it to make extra money.

But things go wrong when click fraud occurs, because fraudulent clicks can inflate the advertisers costs and bring disrepute to the advertising network too, while generating revenue quickly for the concerned publisher. But advertising networks have several secret intelligent mechanisms in place to detect and deal with such fraudulent clicks to protect advertiser costs.

Remember the earlier reports of compromised PCs infected by Clickbot.A being used to automatically click on pay per click ads especially Google Adsense for generating revenue.